How can one do rendering with Cycles using an NVIDIA RTX GPU?
Update as of July 29th 2019: NVIDIA RTX GPUs are now officially supported and can be used to accelerate renderings in Cycles using the raytracing cores of RTX cards. You can read more about this from the Blender Developers blog here.

In the past, RTX GPUs were not supported even for normal use cases unless you compile Blender from source code yourself or download a pre-compiled version of Blender 2.79 (link below)  for Linux. However, if you want the latest features/bug fixes you need to compile Blender from source still. People have compiled Blender this way and submitted their results to Blender OpenData too. As shown on Blender OpenData website, RTX 2080 Ti is currently the best GPU for rendering scenes with Cycles as of now.

If you're using Windows you can follow these instructions to compile Blender yourself:

Install Development Tools

Subversion, Git, CMake and Visual Studio must all be installed.


Install Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition (free)
Install Subversion for Windows (SlikSVN)
Install Git for Windows


In the installer, choose to add Git to your PATH to ensure the Git version is in the splash screen.

Install CMake


In the installer set the system path option to Add CMake to the system PATH for all users.

Install CUDA 10 for CUDA support in Cycles.


Download Sources and Libraries

Create a folder to store your copy of the Blender source code. This guide will assume your chosen folder is C:\blender-git.

Then open the command prompt window by hitting Windows+R, and then typing cmd, or by searching for it in the start menu. Then type the following commands.

For 64-bit Windows, check out the precompiled libraries with Subversion like this:

cd C:\blender-git
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/win64_vc14  lib/win64_vc14


For 32-bit Windows, use this command instead:

cd C:\blender-git
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/windows_vc14  lib/windows_vc14


Download the Blender source code:

cd C:\blender-git
git clone git://git.blender.org/blender.git
cd blender
git submodule update --init --recursive
git submodule foreach git checkout master
git submodule foreach git pull --rebase origin master


Compile Blender

cd C:\blender-git\blender
make full


Source for the things above. In case you follow these steps and you still cannot get Cycles render anything using your RTX card, you need to follow the steps at the end of my post to rebuild/recompile Blender.

For Linux:

If you're on a Unix-based OS you can follow the instructions written here; Make sure you have installed CUDA 10 already. If you don't want to compile Blender yourself, you can instead download a version of Blender 2.79 compiled against CUDA 10 from here.

Update as of Dec 3rd 2018:

As of today, the master branch of Blender natively supports NVIDIA RTX cards. So you don't have to follow the steps below anymore.



In case you follow the above steps and still cannot render anything using your RTX card, you need to do the followings to recompile Blender. This step works for Windows, Linux and Mac:


Open CMakeCache.txt
Look for CYCLES_CUDA_BINARIES_ARCH
Add sm_75 to that list
Rebuild/Recompile Blender